Sodars are a type of radar that transmit sound instead of microwaves. When such sound based radars are used in the atmosphere they are generally referred to as "sodars" and "sonars" when used in water. As used in this specification the term "sodar" applies to both mediums, atmosphere and water, and relates to a process of using wavelet filtering of sound based signals to remove echoes and external sound sources. In addition, the processed signals are compressed to reduce the storage requirements for the sodar records.
When used in the atmosphere, sodars provide information about the winds and structure. Winds are measured using the Doppler shift of the sound that has reflected from temperature gradients in the atmosphere. The structure of temperature inversions in the atmosphere is derived from the amplitude of the signal that was reflected from the inversions, called the reflectivity. Thus, both Doppler and reflectivity data for wavelet based sodar are covered by the this invention all as will be described in detail hereafter.